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Featured in Herb

John White, a painter who traveled with several English exploration companies in North America, made many illustrations of the people, plants and animals that inhabited the area around the Jamestown colony. Theodor de Bry later made engravings based on White's paintings; this image, and 27 others, were included in a 1590 book about the "New World" that was published in four languages: English, French, German and Latin. De Bry noticeably changed details to make the Indians look more European.

The young farm women who worked in the Lowell textile mills were used to hard work, but working the large, noisy mills was different. On the farm, women had controlled their own work schedule, and they did may different tasks. In the mill, women did one task over and over again. Factory owners now controlled the speed and hours of work.

Time Table of the Lowell Mills, Merrimack Valley Textile Museum, from Uses of Liberty Rhetoric Among Lowell Mill Girls, http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/americanstudies/lavender/lowell.html.

With the discovery of gold in California in 1848, men seeking to make their fortunes streamed into the area from all over the world. In 1850, the California legislature passed a Foreign Miners' Tax that required miners who were not U.S. citizens to pay $20 every month for the right to mine in the state. In reality, the tax was only collected from Chinese and Latino miners, while European miners were not forced to pay it. The high tax drove many Latin American miners back to their home countries, and immigrant miners who stayed organized protests. The legislature eventually reduced the tax to $4 per month.

Child cotton-pickers on a farm in Bells, Texas, documented by Lewis W. Hine, a photographer for the National Child Labor Committee. Children had long been used as cotton-pickers and other agricultural workers in the South, where the tradition of sharecropping as well as sheer economic necessity made the practice widespread. In the caption to this photo, Hine notes, "All these children five years, six years, seven years, nine years [of age]... The very young children like to pick, but before long they detest it. Sun is hot, hours long, bags heavy."

During the 1850s, hundreds of thousands of enslaved African Americans were sold by owners in the upper South (Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, West Virginia, Tennessee) to owners in the lower South (Louisiana, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi). This forced migration painfully disrupted slave families by separating husbands from wives and children from their parents. This painting by the British artist Eyre Crowe, based on a sketch made by him when touring the U.S. in 1853, shows a scene at a slave auction in Richmond, Virginia. Slave markets, where such auctions took place, were located throughout the South; the largest was in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Eyre Crowe, Slaves Waiting for Sale, Richmond, Virginia, 1861, painting (Private Collection); available from the University of Virginia, The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas, http://hitchcock.itc.virginia.edu/Slavery/detailsKeyword.php?keyword=sale&recordCount=50&theRecord=23.

In January 1914, the town of Ojinaga in northern Mexico was the site of a battle between the forces of Pancho Villa and those loyal to Mexican president Victoriano Huerta. This photo depicts refugees from the fighting making the sixty-mile journey to Marfa, in Texas. Refugees such as these made up a large portion of early twentieth-century Mexican immigration to the southwestern United States.

In this 1866 illustration, the Anglo-Saxon features of Florence Nightingale, the storied battlefield nurse of the Crimean War, are contrasted with those of "Bridget McBruiser," whose animal-like features and generally slovenly appearance are typical of mid-nineteenth century depictions of Irish immigrants. This comparison appeared in a book about "physiognomy," a branch of supposedly scientific study popular in the nineteenth century which argued that individual moral character and intelligence could be seen in a person's facial features.

In 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which required police officers everywhere in the country to capture escaped slaves and return them to their owners. Anyone who was caught helping escaped slaves could also be arrested and face large fines. As a result of the law, many free African Americans who were not escaped slaves were still captured and sent into slavery in the South.

Theodore Parker, "Caution!! Colored people of Boston," poster, 1851, Boston; from the Library of Congress, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.rbc/rbpe.06002200.

Founded in 1903, the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL) was an organization that brought together working-class women, reformers, and women from wealthy and prominent families. League members believed that working women needed help to gain better wages and working conditions, and that all women shared important values and goals. This seal represented the WTUL’s attitudes and goals; it appeared on their letterhead, publications, and pins.

Supported by government funds, railroad building boomed after the Civil War. There were only 2,000 miles of track in 1850; by 1877 there were nearly 80,000 miles in use. Railroad owners controlled tens of thousands of employees and hundreds of millions of dollars in assets. Larger than some state governments, railroad companies were the largest, most powerful companies Americans had ever known. This cartoon, published in a New York newspaper in 1873, reflects the concerns that many Americans had about the unprecedented political and economic power of the railroads.

Frank Bellew, "The American Frankenstein: 'When Frankenstein Beheld the Hideous Monster He Had Created He Started with Terror and Disgust," New York Daily Graphic, March 18, 1873.

When World War II ended, Ford Motor Company's Highland Park plant, like industrial manufacturers across the country, laid off thousands of women workers and replaced them with inexperienced men. In Highland Park, women members of the United Auto Workers Local 400 organized active protests against the policy, including this picket by 150 women workers outside of the plant's employment office. Eventually, after the issue became part of contract negotiations with the union, several hundred women workers were recalled to the plant.

From Ruth Milkman, Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex during World War II (University of Illinois Press, 1987), 136.

Recent Podcast Episodes

In this episode, Michele Bogart, professor and author of the recently published Sculpture in Gotham: Art and Urban Renewal In New York City, untangles the bureaucracy of monument creation in New York City.

Joshua Freeman, ASHPThe Graduate Center, CUNY

Joshua Freeman, professor of history at CUNY Graduate Center and Queens College and Steven Greenhouse, former labor reporter for the New York Times, discuss Freeman's recent book, Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World.